The Real Helseth
by joyofthejoui
Summary: An Anonymous Indoril Attack Pamphlet on the Royal Family of Mournhold, written around the end of the Third Era. (Apocrypha written for r/teslore, inspired by some strange details in 'The Real Barenziah')


**The Real Helseth**

_"__This is the time of truth-telling,"_ I hear that said everywhere in Morrowind these days. _"No matter how much it hurts, we must pull back the veil of betrayal and falsehood and look full upon the awful truth."_

That this is usually said by some puffed-up Dissident Priest or vindictive Ashlander makes the words bitter to accept, but accept them we do. For there is no other choice.

Yet, this sudden taste for truth-telling and looking ugly facts full in the face ends at the gates of Mournhold's Royal Palace. None dare search out the truth there. What cowards are we that we can dissect the stories of our departed gods, and yet we cower before an upstart prince!

Need I name him to you? You know his misdeeds. You have heard the tales of his treacheries and plots. Indeed, he is proud of them, as the unhampered publication of these tales within Mournhold shows. He is also said to be a kinslayer, and perhaps he is a little less proud of that, for he has not yet paid a scribe to write up a fawning story of his cousin's early demise.

The prince's predilection for publicizing what other mer would consider their deepest shame should be no surprise. At least he has refrained from publishing absolute filth; something that cannot be said of his mother.

The hot-blooded adventures of that lady's youth are actually very pardonable. And we may even muster some sympathy for the outrages the young girl supposedly suffered at the hands of the outlander tyrant. But the manuscript which began to circulate privately and illegally in the Iliac Bay some years ago is now openly published, bound in gilt leather, and available for purchase in any bookshop in the realm. The author, who was once thought to have been executed for his work, lives in the Royal Palace itself, a confidant of the queen whom he supposedly slandered. What are we to make of this but that this gracious wise lady both supplied the contents and oversaw the publishing?

We must be thankful that the Ordinators saw fit to censor the worst passages of the books; I have glanced briefly at an unexpurgated copy of the original manuscript, and the acts depicted therein would bring a blush to the cheeks of a Foreign Quarter whore.

This lady must see some benefit in her many amorous adventures being laid bare to the populace. Does she revel simply in being the object of so much prurient interest? Perhaps, but vain though she may be, she is not silly. She was deeply implicated in the affair of the Imperial Simulacrum, and although all official biographies and histories sing her praises, there were rumours that she was more the Imperial Battlemage's accomplice than his opponent. The scandalous tell-all of her life, however, seemed so honest and revealing of her failings that it convinced even her enemies of her tale. The frail yet resilient figure of this "true story" is sympathetic in a way that the figure of Imperial propaganda could not be.

I do not accuse the lady of being complicit in the false battlemage's schemes, but I do accuse her of concealing an uglier truth within her sordid tale: the parentage of her heir and son.

There are many ridiculous things written within Plitinius Mero's narrative. I would not foul your mind with his strange understanding of mer fertility, but that it is relevant to this deception. Of the mysterious Nightingale, Mero has the queen say

_"Dark Elf in part, perhaps part human too, I think, in disguise. Else would I not have come so quickly to fertility."_

In this tale, the prince who now seeks to subdue all of Morrowind is conceived by this lady and her lawful husband immediately after the Nightingale leaves Mournhold. And his conception was somehow "aided" by the Nightingale's effect on his mother. The husband could not sire a child on his wife in centuries, but now the spell was broken by the sheer magnetism of the Nightingale. How grateful this husband must have been that this burglar did not lie with his wife, even though that was clearly what she wished! How grateful that mere looks of love and sighs exchanged between this guilty couple produced a son of the husband's blood!

For the story is very clear that this son was the child of his mother's husband. Why it says of the young prince,

_"He was much like his father, whom he worshiped."_

Oh very much like him! If the young prince had several human traits, was not this story quick to point out that his mother' s husband was rumoured to have Nord blood? No one ever said that the old general had rounded ears, to be sure, but perhaps the prince's ears are a throwback to those fabled Nord ancestors? Certainly those unpointed ears are not a mark of being sired by the mongrel offshoot of an ancient Nibenese family?

But I digress. The prince himself claims he suffered a misadventure in the perilous court of Wayrest which is responsible for the sad shape of his ears. This may be the truth. I have spoken to those who remember him as a child, and they say that the young boy was kept then in many a hat and hood, so I cannot attest to what shape those ears were when he left Mournhold with his mother so many years ago.

But we can all attest to his mother's affair at last with that mongrel battlemage. A sacrifice for the good of the Empire, perhaps, but even in her own account, it was the consummation of her long love. A love which we also know began nine months before the birth of her first son and heir. Once her affair with the imposter became known, the parentage of this prince began to be questioned along with his mother's participation in the Simulacrum.

And so, the queen commissioned this great work to convince the public of her valor and devotion to duty, to present herself to the world as a sinner whose only sin was to love too deeply, to lay bare so many of her deepest, darkest secrets that none would guess that she was hiding something beneath the rest. She told a compelling, beautiful story of her slow romance with her patient long-suffering husband, and told how their love had at last borne fruit in the birth of their longed-for son.

It's a very pretty lie. But as the Dissident priests like to say, "This is the time of truth-telling." I will tell the truth if no one else will.

Prince Helseth is no child of General Symmachus. He is the son of Queen Barenziah's adulterous liaison with the human-mer mongrel Jagar Tharn.

* * *

**Notes:** If you just look at the text of the Real Barenziah the best candidate for the child born of Barenziah and the Nightingale's tryst in Mournhold would be Helseth. Skyrim complicated the story, and I still have no idea what actually happened, though I'm very skeptical of Gallus getting everything right, but the idea of people seizing on this to attack Helseth tickled my fancy, hence this apocrypha written towards the end of the Third Era by a loyal partisan of House Indoril.


End file.
